Hi, this is Igor from hdhead.com. I have recently rediscovered my love for Avid DS 3D
DVE and although it's slightly outdated, it's still capable of producing interesting looks. In this tutorial
I created something that you would typically use 3D program like Lightwave 3D Studio Max Maya, any program like that, to create a
three-dimensional etched logo in a metal plate. A remarkable thing about this effect is that it is 100%
produced using native DS tools without a single third-party plug-in and this includes sound effects. Everything you see in this piece can be
created using Avid DS version 7.6, possibly even older, so you don't even need the latest DS and I say everything except for the audio.
So let's look at what I'm talking about.
Let's look at the pieces in here. We have a metal plate with a bumpy texture and a reflection in it.
You can see the reflection moving. We have two laser beams etching the logo.
A little glow and blur where they hit the metal surface.
We also have smoke rising from the surface.
We're not going to build this effect from scratch because it would take too much time for this tutorial,
but what we're going to do instead is dissect this tree over here and see how each one of the pieces works.
This tree may seem complicated at first, but when we start breaking it into individual pieces, you'll get a pretty good hang of it.
Let's look at the first thing, which is the solid color that gives the base for a metal.
Then we have the noise that gives metal its little bumps after it goes through the blur, of course, and
we have
the text that etches a hole in the metal. All these pieces combined give us this.
Next thing up, we have a couple of red laser lines and fractal noise.
When we combine these two, we get this sort of a
interrupted laser illuminating particles in the air and with a little bit of an optical glow, you can see how the glow is
denser, where the red color is stronger.
This is the glow off and on, off, on, and
when laser is combined with the metal, we get that and
then we add a little bit of glow and blur where the laser hits the metal.
Then we have three fractal noise generators. When combined, those three look like that
and we shape those up into a little puff of smoke and when that's combined with our piece,
we get the final product.
Let's now tap into each one of these nodes to see what's going on. Actually, I'm not going to disturb the overall tree.
I will just create little offshoots.
Let's load 3DDVE and we're going to feed the metal color into the input one.
The metal color was just a solid color that we saw earlier.
We'll step inside the 3DDVE by double-clicking. First thing we do is we select the layer,
which is our purple background, click on surfaces, property editor, and
enable lighting for the surface.
Now, if I rotate the camera,
you can see
that it's a three-dimensional object that's lit by a single light.
That's the default light in the scene. Next thing over the surfaces property editor,
we'll click on environment and pick satin. Let's try to rotate the camera now and you can see that it's reflecting
one of these built-in environment reflection maps and you can choose a bunch of different ones.
Or you can even feed your own if you add another input to the 3DDVE.
Next thing we're going to do is we're going to add graphics.
Double-click,
draw a couple of keystrokes, get back out,
select 3DDVE, press A on the keyboard to add another input, and connect graphics into 3DDVE.
Go back into 3DDVE. If you uncollapse layers, the
DV connected to input 2, which we don't really need, you can select it and delete it by pressing delete on the keyboard.
What we do need is
select the purple metal plate and go to DV property editor and under displacement texture, select input 2.
So now what's going on is we're creating a
displacement with those three brushstrokes we created in the graphics. Displacement looks really rough, but we can fix that.
First thing we'll do is
we'll place offset back to 0, decrease softness to 1, and increase detail to 10 and 10.
So now you see a much more defined brushstroke and this brushstroke is
projecting out of the background and we can change that by inverting the
black and white values of the image that we're feeding inside. So everything that's white will pop out,
everything that's black stays back, and the amount of extrusion is determined by the scale factor.
So we'll put this to 0.25. See, there's a
tiny little bump coming out of there, projecting towards us.
We can change the direction of the extrusion by either inverting these black and white values in the graphics or
for a quick fix, we can just go to pick negative preset, feed it in here.
And as you can see now, the hole is being etched inside of the surface. As you saw earlier, our metal plate also had little bumps.
And here's our noise and blur. And if you feed
the blur and the noise instead of our DS brushstroke here, now you'll see our surface has this bumpy texture.
And if I disable the blur, we get a lot sharper surface. So that's why I keep the blur to round off the bumps. Now,
the problem is there's only one input that goes into this displacement map.
So our choice is to either feed the bumps or the logo. But how do we do both? Well, let's see.
Over here in the original effect, the etching for the logo is
composited over the noisy background. It's a little hard to see, but you see there's this parchment-like white noise
behind the black logo. And if I take the output of this composite,
feed it into our input 2 on our new 3D DVE and zoom into that, you can see
fine little bumpy texture along with the etching of the logo. The amount of bumps is determined by the amount of mix of the noise
in this composite. So if I add more, you see how the surface is getting bumpier.
Now, it's pretty bumpy. That's as much as we can go in this case without changing the levels in the noise itself.
Go inside the 3D DVE, rotate our camera.
You can see the effect of the bumps along with the logo.
Next thing up is the handwriting effect. I will add another graphics preset. Double-click in there.
I will paste our fine logo, and there are several different ways you can create the handwriting.
One of them is to paint over the letters with a brush that kind of covers the letters, but not too thick.
And I will do that in the order in which I would write this. So we'll start here.
I, dot, and E. As you can see, I have several new freehand strokes down here. I will select them all
and we'll go to Objects, Handwriting. Let's turn off the bounding boxes so you can see this better.
As I change the amount of heads and tails, I can make this thing right now.
You see that each one of the strokes is starting at the same time.
And to overcome that, we'll go back to Graphics, Objects, Combined Strokes.
So now we're writing from the top. And you can imagine how you can use this to mask off the word.
Of course, you don't have to write it backwards. You can just animate it backwards.
Moving on, let's see how the lasers are created. We'll add another graphics.
Double-click. Select the line tool. Let's go with a thin line, maybe 5-diameter brush.
A softness profile to 100. Hardness diameter to 0. As far as the masks, let's paint on red and alpha only.
Red channel and alpha. So here is a line that stretches across the screen.
Just a simple red line with a corresponding alpha channel. Go back out.
Here's the fractal noise. We'll just copy and paste this one here.
The goal is to have a good ratio of black and white areas.
So wherever we have black, the laser will be invisible.
And instead of fishing for the other presets I need, I'm just going to multiple select the composite and optical glow.
Copy with Ctrl C and Paste with Ctrl V.
And we'll feed the fractal noise into the bottom and the graphics in the top.
And as you can see, now our line has little interruptions in it.
If you need to vary the thickness of the laser, go back to the graphics and make the brush thicker.
Let's try double the value. Go back out and here's our new laser.
Now the optical glow adds a nice soft glow to the laser.
And if you look at the alpha channel, you'll see that there's alpha channel associated with it.
So this will composite whatever we feed it over.
So let's try to combine our pieces together. We'll do a little bit of a cleanup.
I'm going to move this tree up here. We'll move this down here.
This is an old graphics thing we no longer need. I'm going to steal this composite from there.
This will go into the bottom and optical glow will go up here.
And now you can see our laser over the metal plate.
Let's quickly animate the DS strokes. So we'll select all the stroke, go to graphics, objects,
combine strokes, go back to objects, handwriting.
And with the combined stroke selected, we'll click on forward,
which has created an animated handwriting stroke over the entire length of the object,
which is four seconds. And we need to make this faster.
So what I'll do is make sure the object is selected, go to the animation editor,
select all the channels. First we'll make it linear so the speed is constant.
And I'm going to re-time it by moving the last keyframe towards the beginning.
So now we have a more reasonable speed of writing.
So now to animate the laser, we'll click on the graphics.
Once you're inside the graphics, you see the red line over black.
You don't see your entire composite. So in order to do that, we're going to step out
and connect the output of the composite to the output node.
Step back into the graphics and select reconnect your top timeline.
So now we can see both elements in context.
And to animate the laser, now simply enable automatic keyframing down with the A.
And just step through your piece, moving the laser wherever the stroke goes.
You get the idea. Next thing up, we'll make a little blur
and glow wherever the laser hits the metal. We'll copy and paste the existing burn glow,
which is just a graphics effect, in place between our composite and the output.
And double click, get inside. As you can see, there are already two little dots
from the existing effect that we'll make our own.
I'll just place a little circular brush stroke, select it,
right click on brush effects and change it to stack effect.
And inside the stack effect, we'll add a couple of dodge and burn presets.
One of them will set for mid tones and one of them for highlights.
And you can experiment with this, get whatever works for you.
We'll close these two boxes and we'll add a blur.
Double click, set the amount of blur.
And I'll make horizontal blur a little wider just to smudge it in a more interesting way.
And then on top of this, we'll add color blend just to give it a little bit of a tint.
Double click that, pick whatever color works for you.
If I step through the effect, you can see the existing
blurs are animated, but they also change size and opacity,
which you can easily animate. See if I select one of these existing ones.
You can see over here the opacity graph.
The thing is changing opacity to give it a more interesting look.
So that's it for burn and glow. The last remaining thing is the smoke effect.
And if you look up one of the older tutorials called fog and smoke,
you'll notice that this whole section over here on top left was actually lifted from that tutorial,
except for this matte smoke shaper.
So I'm not going to get on a great amount of detail how this is created.
You should watch the fog and smoke tutorial.
But basically we'll just say that there are three fractal noise generators
that generate three different levels and frequencies of the smoke
just to give it a more of a feeling of a volume.
And there are warp operators on two of these to give it a more turbulent feel.
So we combine all three pieces here and you can see how
they're moving in more than just one direction,
giving it more of a natural organic feeling of the smoke.
And for this purpose, we also added this matte smoke shaper,
which is basically a matte shape that's animated.
Nothing elaborate and not very realistic either, but it works pretty well.
It allows the smoke to start off as a small dot and then expand.
Let's see what that looks like in real time.
At the beginning of the tutorial, I mentioned that even the sound is made within DS
to see how that's done.
Let's click on one of these tone generator effects.
I have two of them, one for the left channel, one for the right channel.
This one is simply an animation with gain and frequency keyframes.
And the second one has a little bit of randomness that's using an expression.
If you right click here, go to Expression Editor.
You can see the expression used to create this pingy little sound.
If you look up one of my older tutorials,
I believe it's called Intermediate Expressions,
or maybe Intermediate Expressions Part 2 or something like that.
You will see how you can use expressions to create sounds and have a DS.
That's it for our tutorial.
You can also go to hdhead.com and download this whole preset to see how it works.
It's a good thing, actually.
You can plug it in and start changing values.
It's a good way to learn.
